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Distributing Transparency, the White House Way

One of the most interesting elements in this Thursday's "summit" at the White House on health care reform is the Administration's commitment to broadcast the proceedings live. But it's not just inviting C-SPAN into the room (finally), or posting the video on the "/live" section of WhiteHouse.gov. The White House new media operation is giving the embed code to anyone who wants to host the video on their own website. I'm pasting the code in below so you can see what you get, for now...

There's a sweet deal in here for Facebook (the embed runs a Facebook chat alongside the video stream), which raises some side-questions about whether it is proper for the White House to implicitly favor one private social network platform over all the others. (And I bet you can easily disable that chat stream if you want to fiddle with the code.)

But I'm more interested in seeing how the networked public sphere swarms over this content in real-time. Whatever else happens on Thursday--whether the TV networks roadblock the summit or cover it live and in full--you can be assured that there will be many places on the web where people are gathered to watch and discuss the encounter. Kudos to the White House for making that possible by making the video freely available.

News Briefs

Hillary Clinton's deleted emails might not be as gone as she thinks; people making decisions about encryption know nothing about encryption; Meerkat is dead (already); finding out that Facebook filters the newsfeed is, to some like waking up in the Matrix; and much, much more. GO

Get to know Clinton's digital team even better; Ted Cruz election announcement-related fundraising offers peak into the coming data-driven campaign arms race; New York City launches online community engagement pilot program called IdeaScale; and much, much more. GO